interesting op engines

[BrendAn]

 

[old man emu]

Everything old is new again!

 

The idea of cylinders being arranged around the crankshaft, with the pistons moving away from the crankshaft, is a design that has dominated automotive, aero and stationary engine design for a century and a half. It has led us to believe that such is the only way to produce reciprocating motion. We are well acquainted with the typical system whereby the piston is connected to the crankshaft by a rod. That connection can be direct as we normally see:

 

or it can be done with a slotted rod called a Scotch Yoke. Watch the first bit of this video to see how the system works. The op engine seems to use something similar to the design of the machine on the left end of the second row in the picture. The operation of that system is shown at the end of the video.

 

 

 

[Area-51]

Ah it is a swashplate engine 😊

Edited June 28, 2023 by Area-51

[facthunter]

Modified Hydraulic pump with variable output. Used as Hydrodrives and CSU's(Constant Speed Units) for Alternating Current(Tied Synchronous) generators.  Nev

[BrendAn]

33 minutes ago, Area-51 said:

Ah it is a swashplate engine 😊

certainly is

[onetrack]

There's simply not enough efficiency gain in a swashplate engine to provide a major leap over current engines. I note that he he doesn't mention any thermal efficiency percentages of this swashplate engine, it would still be struggling to reach 40% thermal efficiency at energy conversion. A couple of low speed, conventional heavy duty truck and marine engines have just cracked a little over 50% thermal efficiency - but battery and electric motor efficiencies are gaining rapidly on IC engines.

 

https://transportoperator.co.uk/2020/10/31/diesel-breaks-50-efficiency-barrier/

[BrendAn]

this swashplate engine may actually get somewhere. supposed to have the 22hp version on the market this year.

roller bearings running on a swashplate should be low friction and long wearing if it gets good lubrication.

[BrendAn]

Just now, onetrack said:

There's simply not enough efficiency gain in a swashplate engine to provide a major leap over current engines. I note that he he doesn't mention any thermal efficiency percentages of this swashplate engine, it would still be struggling to reach 40% thermal efficiency at energy conversion. A couple of low speed, conventional heavy duty truck and marine engines have just cracked a little over 50% thermal efficiency - but battery and electric motor efficiencies are gaining rapidly on IC engines.

 

https://transportoperator.co.uk/2020/10/31/diesel-breaks-50-efficiency-barrier/

gardner diesels made 51 percent years ago. pretty sure i read that .

[BrendAn]

2 minutes ago, onetrack said:

There's simply not enough efficiency gain in a swashplate engine to provide a major leap over current engines. I note that he he doesn't mention any thermal efficiency percentages of this swashplate engine, it would still be struggling to reach 40% thermal efficiency at energy conversion. A couple of low speed, conventional heavy duty truck and marine engines have just cracked a little over 50% thermal efficiency - but battery and electric motor efficiencies are gaining rapidly on IC engines.

 

https://transportoperator.co.uk/2020/10/31/diesel-breaks-50-efficiency-barrier/

what do you base this on. have you experimented with a swashplate engine.

[facthunter]

Been around a longtime. Any pump can be an engine but you have to cool it when you put fires in there.  The porting is disc and so far that doesn't work as well as Poppet valves.  Nev

[onetrack]

No - my opinion is based on the simple fact that no swashplate engine has ever become a commercial success. Nearly all of the inventors of these engines have based their ideas on looking at swashplate hydraulic pumps, which are a different kettle of fish altogether.

 

Ralph Sarich designed his engine after seeing a dismantled hydraulic pump out of a bulldozer, when he was working as a dozer salesman for Tutt Bryant.

But no-one - not even Ford or GM -  could get the Sarich engine to the stage where it was commercially successful. It had too many problems, not the least of which was heat dissipation, wear levels, and sealing problems.

 

Edited June 29, 2023 by onetrack

[facthunter]

You didn't have to be Einstein to work it our either with the Sarich motor. The easiest surfaces to seal are cylindrical. When you look at all these proposals will they work at say 12,000 R's/PM. The Dooling model aircraft motors ran at 42,000 RPM just post war. All those weird crank shapes lack simplicity and good load path s and are too weighty.. in the moving parts.  Nev

[onetrack]

Brad Howell-Smith invented the Revetec X4v2 engine in the mid-1990's - a trilobate crankshaft engine which was going to revolutionise IC engines. But despite spending millions in R&D, the Revetec engine went nowhere. 

The design went to the Middle East, then it ended up in Turkey - and no matter who fiddled with the design and tried adding improvements, the design simply died about 10 years ago, up against all the age-old problems of heat dissipation, wear levels, inadequate build materials quality to cope with the stresses - and weight.

 

http://www.rexresearch.com/revetec/revetec.htm

 

 

[BrendAn]

30 minutes ago, onetrack said:

No - my opinion is based on the simple fact that no swashplate engine has ever become a commercial success. Nearly all of the inventors of these engines have based their ideas on looking at swashplate hydraulic pumps, which are a different kettle of fish altogether.

 

Ralph Sarich designed his engine after seeing a dismantled hydraulic pump out of a bulldozer, when he was working as a dozer salesman for Tutt Bryant.

But no-one - not even Ford or GM -  could get the Sarich engine to the stage where it was commercially successful. It had too many problems, not the least of which was heat dissipation, wear levels, and sealing problems.

 

his fuel injection was good though. 

[old man emu]

Clearly the major problem with ALL heat engines is that of dissipating the heat. Wear/sealing problems are the product of failing to adequately solve the heat dissipation problem. 

 

The ways that have been tried to deal with this in ICEs have been: moving the cylinders through the air (rotary engine); moving air over stationary cylinders (radial and boxer engines), and thermal transfer using a liquid ("water" cooled).  In each case, weight has to be added to the basic 'cylinder attached to a box containing a shaft' design. 

 

We know from thermodynamics that a 14.7:1 air/fuel mixture will produce a known amount of heat. The amount of heat is dependent on the quantities of fuel and air that are burnt - using a large diameter cylinder will provide more heat than a smaller diameter one (all other things being equal).

 

What gets me thinking about heat dissipation in an engine where opposing pistons move towards each other to create a "combustion chamber" is 'how do you get rid of the heat produced in a space buried in the middle of the mass of the engine?'. 

[facthunter]

The heat absorbed is proportional to the AREA exposed and you have just eliminated 2 cylinder heads and a lot of area.  Nev

[BrendAn]

commer knockers  worked fine towing heavy loads

[facthunter]

They weren't overpowered and were sometimes hard to start cold and were 2 strokes a bit similar to a Napier Deltic as far as the combustion chambers were concerned. Junkers Jumo is similar with geared crankshafts instead of linkages.  Nev

[BrendAn]

it will be interesting to see if that 22hp swashplate motor does hit the market . 

the junkers was quite an advanced engine for its time when you consider the merlin was the best the allies could come up with.

[kgwilson]

This bloke clearly has not done his homework.

 

Who is going to finance an unproven  new internal combustion engine when clearly all manufacturers are moving to electric and hydrogen power to meet zero emission standards in the future.

 

Janus trucks here have an electric B double that can get from Sydney to Coffs harbour on a single charge & the battery can be swapped out in 15 minutes while the driver has a compulsory 2 hour stand down period.

 

All he is advocating is another Hybrid & these have been shown to be the worst of both worlds, though Toyota is persisting with them...... for now.

 

He hasn't kept up with battery development. The new Sodium batterys have energy density almost as good as lithium 200Wh/KG and CATL says they will surpass lithium density within 2 years. They also do not require cobalt or nickel & even the LIFePO4 batteries do not require cobalt.

[facthunter]

The Junkers was used for it's fuel economy. In Bombers.. In a fair and full contest I doubt whether the Merlin would be better than anything else the Allies produced. Some of the best Radials might displace it. More Powerful and more damage resistant.. The Merlin was never a long life Motor and had a compromised Magneto drive.  Nev

[BrendAn]

3 minutes ago, kgwilson said:

This bloke clearly has not done his homework.

 

Who is going to finance an unproven  new internal combustion engine when clearly all manufacturers are moving to electric and hydrogen power to meet zero emission standards in the future.

 

Janus trucks here have an electric B double that can get from Sydney to Coffs harbour on a single charge & the battery can be swapped out in 15 minutes while the driver has a compulsory 2 hour stand down period.

 

All he is advocating is another Hybrid & these have been shown to be the worst of both worlds, though Toyota is persisting with them...... for now.

 

He hasn't kept up with battery development. The new Sodium batterys have energy density almost as good as lithium 200Wh/KG and CATL says they will surpass lithium density within 2 years. They also do not require cobalt or nickel & even the LIFePO4 batteries do not require cobalt.

i am pretty sure these companies do research. i would say the small version they say is going to market this year is aimed at drones. looks about the right size and seems to be a lot of manufacturers after the military contracts.

[BrendAn]

Just now, facthunter said:

The Junkers was used for it's fuel economy. In Bombers.. In a fair and full contest I doubt whether the Merlin would be better than anything else the Allies produced. Some of the best Radials might displace it. More Powerful and more damage resistant.. The Merlin was never a long life Motor and had a compromised Magneto drive.  Nev

did i read one of your posts that said merlins had a 200 hr tbo. although that would be  a long long time in ww2.

[facthunter]

The best civilian life (Derated from wartime ) was 650 hours but many Countries never allowed it on their civil register.  Nev.

[onetrack]

Revetec had a fabulous website, money and backers behind it, and he promised a major leap in aircraft power units. But despite producing a few prototype engines, and fitting them to road-going trikes, the engine went precisely nowhere.

The inventor had hundreds of interested parties look at his engine and examine the potential - and at the end of the day, it all just faded away and disappeared - like so many thousands of "fantastic new engines" before him.